So I was just reading Jason Fell’s article on Entrepreneur.com about users making a switch from a traditional BlackBerry device to either an Android based device or an iPhone. Having made the switch myself almost a year ago I can certainly understand why many users are doing this.
First is the cost. I saved $7.50 per month when switching from BlackBerry’s BlackBerry Enterprise Server to ActiveSync, which Android uses to synch my email, calendar, and contacts with Microsoft’s Exchange email service. For small organizations the savings per month really add up when multiple users are affected.
Second is the applications. BlackBerry has taken a long time to get to where iPhone and Android are with their applications and they are still not there in terms of he quantity of applications available. Not to mention that the touch-screen interface of both the iPhone and Android devices makes the use of the applications much more friendly to use.
Finally, social media. Both the iPhone and Android have raced to the forefront of the social media realm focusing on capturing your everyday user where BlackBerry was traditionally focused on the corporate user. This has lead to more and more users adopting Android and iPhones in their personal lives to take advantage of the Twitter, Facebook, and other apps and then falling in love with the other features of the phones. BlackBerry has these apps but, in my experience, they do not work as well.
It is going to be interesting to see what BlacBerry does to compete with the makers of Android devices and Apple with the iPhone…I, for one, would like to see more touch screens.
TJS
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